Project Summary

Sohee Park, Ph.D. (Independent Investigator 2004) of Vanderbilt University, plans to study the neural underpinnings for some of the social behavioral symptoms, such as abnormal facial affect recognition or social cue perception, that occur in schizophrenia. Dr. Park hypothesizes that deficits in attentional orienting (ATT) and working memory (WM) may be responsible for the perception and interpretation of social stimuli. The aims of the present proposal are to: (a) investigate how ATT facilitates detection and extraction of socially-relevant features in the environment, using an eye-tracker to assess search strategies, and the roles of ATT and WM in the interpretation of social stimuli, (b) examine clinical symptoms, especially negative symptoms in relation to reduced ATT, WM and social deficits (c) relate community functioning with the laboratory measures of social cognition deficits, and (d) understand the neural underpinnings of cognitive deficits that may lead to social deficits using event-related fMRI experiments to observe brain activation patterns during social and nonsocial information processing. Study results should elucidate the core neurocognitive deficits that may result in social deficits and contribute towards specifying the functional neuroanatomy of social cognition in schizophrenia.

Program Area: SCHIZOPHRENIA/PSYCHOTIC DISORDERS\Schizophrenia

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